What conclusions can one draw about US tax policy from an article talking about how much money the rich have sheltered around the world? There isn't even a breakdown about how much of that is from US citizens.

Comrade wrote:How can you draw that if you do not know how many of these are Anericans and how much money they have abroad?

Can we agree that it's somewhere between $0 and $21,000,000,000,000? Would 25% be a conservative estimate? Any way you slice it, it's a huge amount of money that is probably not subject to taxation and is certainly not driving the American economy. As Fisti points out, if the very wealthy are offshoring their money to avoid taxes (or save it from a nightmarishly deregulated financial system) how are efforts to reduce their taxes going to have a positive effect on the economy?

A thinking person cannot come to those conclusions at all from the evidence presented.

What exactly is the breakdown of these "rich" people by country and by dollar value?

If you know that, then you can compare tax policy amongst those countries with the most people seeking to shelter their wealth.

If you do that, AND you also compare those results with tax policy of countries with people NOT seeking to shelter wealth, THEN you might be able to come to a conclusion. That conclusion could be helpful in determining what effective tax policy MIGHT be.

However, since you are either not bright enough to too lazy to do that research, there is not much to talk about. I really don't mean to seem insulting, but it really should not be necessary to lay things out like this for educated people that have developed critical reasoning skills.

Therefore there is not much to discuss with this article alone. It doesn't tell you enough about anything to even start a discussion.

Let's see... no proof that America is losing due to financial offshoring, so it isn't happening. However, there's no proof of voter fraud, but that's happening everywhere, all the time. Got it?

Not only are the rich different from you and me, they have never been average Americans, have no idea what it means to be an average American and are woefully ill-prepared and inappropriate to lead the American people.

What exactly is the breakdown of these "rich" people by country and by dollar value?

If you know that, then you can compare tax policy amongst those countries with the most people seeking to shelter their wealth.

If you do that, AND you also compare those results with tax policy of countries with people NOT seeking to shelter wealth, THEN you might be able to come to a conclusion. That conclusion could be helpful in determining what effective tax policy MIGHT be.

You're making this harder than necessary, insofar as I can get at what you're trying to say here.

Any US dollar belonging to a US citizen that's sheltered overseas (the dollar, not the citizen) is a dollar that is removed from the reckoning of that person's US taxes.

It is in the interests of the US treasury to have the number of those dollars to be as close to zero as possible. Our tax policy should reflect that reality. If we catch people moving money to other countries so it remains off their tax returns, we assess a penalty severe enough that keeping things legal is worthwhile for the taxpayer. We give our enforcement officials all the tools and backup they need to do the job.

Problem solved.

We aren't in the business of making our tax rate lower than anybody else's so no one tries to hide their money. (It wouldn't work at lower levels of income so why would it work at the upper levels?) That's not how the tax code is written and not how taxes have been collected historically in the US since forever. Instead, we use enforcement and penalties.